Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The fakes and the real thing

India's
Indian Space research organisation (ISRO) launched a mission to
planet Mars on 5th
November2013 known as 'Mars Orbiter Mission' (MOM). As far as the
launch was concerned, there was nothing unusual, as ISRO's workhorse
PSLV rocket was used for launching, which had previously completed 24
launches. The MOM mission was it's 25th
launch.

What
was unusual in this launch was the PR effort undertaken by this
Government owned organization by opening a facebook page
(https://www.facebook.com/isromom) on October 22nd,
2013, dedicated to this mission. It was perhaps the best part of the
effort, as behaviour of the spacecraft moving at breakneck speed
above in the vast wilderness of space was actually reported to all
interested Indians accurately and timely by this page. The effort was
well awarded immediately as number of likes soon crossed 250, 000, a
feat not easy to achieve.

The
most important gain that was achieved by this web page was the
tremendous awareness and interest it created amongst India's net
savvy youth. There was some criticism about cost of the mission in
some media. A school boy however sent a note to ISRO web page
describing how much inspired he was? Because of the ISRO moon mission
and this prompted a feedback from one of the netizens saying that if
this mission can inspire 100 such young Indians, that gain itself
would offset the mission expenditure. How true, isn't it?

As the
Mars bound spacecraft successfully completed space maneuvers one
after another, the ISRO web page became even more popular. But as it
happens with every success, number of scrupulous web sites and web
pages appeared piggyback riding on ISRO's success. The ISRO was
naturally frustrated and have now published a formal notice to these
unscrupulous operators and I quote:

“Caution
Against Forged Social Media Profiles Floated in the Name of
ISRO/Department of Space

ISRO
started an official page on Facebook titled ISROs Mars Orbiter
Mission (facebook.com/isromom) on October 22, 2013, to provide near
real time authentic information about the programme.

It
is observed that a number of pages in the social media (Facebook and
Twitter) are floated in the name of ISRO / Department of Space/
Mangalyaan, etc., which have no authenticity and ISRO does not take
any responsibility for any content hosted on these pages. Some of
these FORGED pages are:

Such
impersonation of the organisation is construed to be a serious
offence and stern legal actions against these pages/administrators of
these pages are being initiated from ISRO/Department of Space to
bring them to immediate closure.”

These
fake facebook and twitter pages appear to have done better than
ISRO's original page itself. Ironically, the FB page Isro.org has
got 370000 likes, almost 80,000 more than Isro's original Mars
mission page. The two fake Isro accounts on Twitter have close to
5,000 followers. These pages and updates have been giving information
on the mission, media reports on ISRO and discussions, photographs
and satellite pictures. The FB pages have also used the ISRO logo
without authorisation. Some of them have become friends of US space
agency NASA to look original. ISRO chairman commenting on these
spurious web pages says: "I don't say they are giving false
information, but we want to put an end to these fakes."

It
is unlikely that these web sites would just give up because of ISRO's
notice. That might be just the first legal step. Since filing a legal
suit against owners of these web pages is also not feasible as in the
first place ISRO does not even know, who are all violating or
infringing on their intellectual property right, and secondly they
may not be based in India at all. What legal experts say is that a
legal suit needs to be filed in a jurisdictional high court against
all well known service providers and unknown respondents also under a
common identity, which includes any or all of the words like ISRO,
MOM, Mangalyan etc.etc.

We
do have a case here, which illustrates how easy it is to take
advantage of any success on internet and violate or infringe on
somebody else's intellectual property rights. No doubt it is a major
shortcoming for the internet and needs more stringent controls on
such acts.